Make Mine a Marine (31 page)

Hawk cursed himself. He had awakened her and left her wanting. But that regret didn't alarm him as much as the telltale evidence he saw when she lifted her face to his.

"He hurt you."

Too dazed to comprehend the self-loathing in his voice, Sarah misunderstood. "You didn't hurt me."

He pushed aside the collar of her gingham blouse and stared at the exposed skin. In chilling slow motion, he wrapped his right hand around the base of her throat. She stiffened at the contact and Hawk thought she must be remembering something he couldn't.

The red marks on her neck, just beginning to darken into bruises, fit the span of his hand like two pieces of a puzzle joining together.

Hawk jerked his hand away and swore viciously. He rolled to his feet and stalked away, ignoring the wounded look in Sarah's eyes.

What the hell kind of bastard was he? He could have killed her! And judging by the strangle marks on her gullet, he must have tried.

He whirled around to face her and felt her reaction like a punch in the gut when she scooted away from him. He quashed the urge to help her up, to scoop her into his arms and kiss her until she was too mindless to distrust him again. She crawled unsteadily to her feet and crossed her arms in front of her. The shielding action that shut him out was no more than he deserved.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, Sarah," he apologized. "You'll never know how deeply I regret that."

"It's okay." Green had become the dominant color in her huge eyes, and he wondered why he couldn't read her emotions just then. She had shut herself off again, shutting him out in that way, too.

Without another word she turned and pushed aside a fern as tall as she and walked away from him.

"Sarah," he called. Night came early beneath the dense canopy of the jungle. "Where are you going?"

"Back to camp." She stopped and gave a toneless answer. "The girls shouldn't be alone."

Hawk swallowed past the hard knot of remorse in his throat. "You're going the wrong way."

She turned and came back to him. With her hands balled into fists at her hips, she challenged him with the proud tilt of her chin. "How do you know?"

He wondered what this show of spirit cost her. He lobbed her emotional havoc on top of his growing mound of guilt. "I just know."

"Then take me back."

It wasn't an offer of trust so much as a deference to practicality. Nodding to her command, he held out his hand. She stared at it with repulsion in her eyes. Was she remembering the way he'd held her? His own palm itched with the memory of her womanly shape. Mentally, he closed off the memory. He needed to concentrate on his alternate senses to find their way back.

"I can't afford to lose you on the way," he said aloud, struggling to remain detached and use the same common sense she displayed.

Reluctantly, she placed her hand in his, but she didn't hold on. He had to squeeze his hand around hers to maintain the contact. Words were useless at this point. How could he explain what had happened to him in the tomb? How could he rationalize the way he'd kissed her a few moments ago? How could he ask forgiveness for pulling away so suddenly?

If he needed any further proof of his failures, he felt it in the chill of her hand. Hawk tipped his nose to the sky and waited for the scent of the campfire to reinforce his sense of direction. When he hiked out of the clearing, Sarah followed meekly behind.

She had turned to him to offer comfort, and he had taken advantage of that generosity and awakened her to passion. Her innocence had given him false hope—her hands had set him on fire. What kind of man did that to a woman?

What kind of freak?

He'd proven unreliable. His actions were unforgivable.

Again.

He couldn't blame the damn island this time.

Sarah buttoned her blouse, deferring to modesty over the heat. She paced her tent like a caged animal, trapped inside by the suffocating curtain of rain falling outside. Since their arrival on Tenebrosa, she'd quickly learned that these rainstorms lasted only a few short minutes, but the rain fell with such an awesome natural force and abandon that everything else in this tropical world stopped for that short period of time.

Much like Hawk's kiss.

Luis had warned them to stay inside their tents during the blinding deluges, but she was tempted to run outside and let the rain pelt her body. Maybe if it rained long enough or hard enough, she could erase the memory of Hawk's hands on her skin or the taste of him on her mouth. Echoes of her foolish foray into passion still reverberated through her like tiny aftershocks from an earthquake.

Her concern for him had been justified. That weird gas inside the tomb had affected his mind somehow.  Otherwise, she knew he never would have kissed her. She'd set herself up for his rejection. If she'd kept her wits about her, she wouldn't have subjected herself to that kind of humiliation. She'd very nearly succumbed to her attraction to him the night before. Tonight she hadn't been so lucky.

If she were more of a woman, she'd have seen what was coming. She'd have known that Hawk's reactions were beyond his control.  She could have played some game, bantered her way out of there, given him the hug he needed and walked away.

But she had wanted him to kiss her so badly. Her single-minded fascination wasn't just with the act—if she was curious enough she could read a book about it—but with the man himself. She'd never experienced that overwhelming rush of desire with any other man.  She’d never needed to be kissed by anyone else. She hadn't said the words, but somehow he'd known what she wanted. Where to put his hands, when to use his lips or tongue, how to angle his mouth.

Too bad she hadn't known how to do the same for him.

She forced herself out of those thoughts and realized she was rubbing her finger back and forth across her lips, remembering how Hawk had felt there. She stomped her foot on the wooden platform floor and dug her brush out of her tote bag. She resumed her pacing, dragging the bristles through her hair with the same frustrated, repetitive motion.

Hawk hadn't even known what he was doing, hadn't even known who she was, when he'd held her. As soon as he’d come to his senses, he pushed her away. And she still couldn't make herself forget him.

"Grow up already," she chastised herself. Walter had taught her that a man couldn't want her. She owned property and a reputation that would make her a suitable wife, but she had nothing more to offer a man, nothing to interest him in her instead of the family name or bank account. And it wasn't just Walter, although he'd been the only man generous enough to be honest with her.

Shyness and plain looks had kept her from dating when she was young and her friends had started. She'd thrown herself into her books in college, building self-esteem through academic accomplishments and hard work. Then, when she would have left home to make her place in the world, her mother fell ill. Two long, difficult years that demanded her full attention turned her into an adult with heavy responsibilities. Left alone with her father, she couldn't shirk those responsibilities, because he’d needed her then.

She was twenty-seven when she lost him, although she'd felt ages older. By the time she'd worked through her grief, Aunt Doris and Aunt Millie began to claim her time. They weren't invalids, but they were lonely. Loneliness was one sentiment she understood in spades, and she could hardly abandon them to such a fate. By the time she’d turned thirty, she was firmly entrenched in her role as an icon of the community—the spinster schoolmarm who lived in the big house on the hill all alone. When Walter began to court her, she gathered the courage to be young again, to try to catch up on everything she had missed over the years.

And then he made her realize it was already too late for her.

But when her students won the Sinclair grant, she began to hope there was a little bit of life left in her. And when Hawk materialized out of the crowd, out of the shadows, and out of the jungle, she began to wish. Her pulse raced and her words got stuck in her head and her spirit felt more alive than she could ever remember.

He was pure danger to her sheltered life. She was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, a foolish addiction that only guaranteed her destruction.

And Sarah was too smart a woman for that. At least, she hoped she was. She stopped at the foot of her cot and listened to the softening drumbeat of rain on her tent roof, a sure sign that the storm would end at any minute. Like a game-show contestant whose time was running out, she made a decision.

She had to have everything spelled out in black and white so that needy little well of wishing inside her wouldn't embarrass her again. She could at least retain her dignity and her common sense, and not lose the girls' respect for her.

When the rain stopped, she knew there was no turning back.

The hour was late, and as much as confrontations like this twisted her stomach into knots, she had to do it. She had to talk to Hawk. With her flashlight lost for the night in Meczaquatl's tomb, she picked up the camping lantern from her tent and went outside.

The clouds hadn't dissipated yet, and even in this clearing where the tents surrounded the fire pit, her lantern cut a meager yellow halo of light through the thick, moonless night.

She extended the lantern to arm's length and tried to get her bearings. Hawk had led her unerringly back to camp without aid of lantern or flashlight, but here she stood in the circle of six tents and had difficulty telling which marked path led to the ruins, the lagoon, or Hawk's tent.

Trusting her instincts as much as the flip of a coin, she chose the narrowest trail, assuming his path would show the least amount of use. Hawk's tent was a smaller structure that had been pitched directly on the ground outside the circle of the camp. Curious, she thought, as she picked her way over exposed tree roots and chopped vegetation, that Luis and his men hadn't asked Hawk to bunk with them. Hawk hadn't complained, but in Sarah's mind, the exclusion bordered on rudeness, in addition to the impracticality of doubling their time and effort to set up his quarters.

At this moment, however, she was glad for the relative seclusion. She didn't want to risk anyone else overhearing what she had to say, or it would defeat the whole point of the conversation.

The fates were with her, and within minutes she stood before the front flap of Hawk's darkened tent. He'd already gone to bed! Of course, he didn't have painful concerns to keep him up at night, the way she did. Sarah hovered outside, debating whether she should announce herself and wake him now, or come back early in the morning and catch him before breakfast. The rain had been only a temporary excuse. She couldn't be sure her shaky fortitude would last until sunup.

With her fist poised to knock, the tent flap was flung open. Startled, she snatched her hand to her chest and jumped back. In the space of a heartbeat, Hawk filled the opening. Naked to the waistband of a pair of khaki green boxer shorts, and bare from his thighs down his sleek, strong legs to his long, masculine toes, he stood before her, holding that twelve-inch knife in his fist, ready to pounce.

Rendered speechless by a sudden jolt of awareness, Sarah stared at his chest. Smooth and supple, and as coppery-dark as the rest of him, the broad planes tapered down across his rib cage to the healthy flatness of his stomach. Dusky brown male nipples perched like badges of honor on the sculpted rise of muscle, and she didn't dare wonder if the parts she couldn't see were as bare and hard and sinewed as the rest of him.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, his soft voice a dark, wary sound in the night.

Oh, God, what was she thinking, coming here in the middle of the night?

Big, big mistake
. What had she thought the man would sleep in? A more sensible woman would have guessed, and waited until he had dressed in the morning to have this discussion.

"Sarah?" he asked again, lowering his knife to his side.

"No, nothing's wrong." Her tongue felt dry and swollen in her mouth. She discovered a rip in the netting at the door of his tent and concentrated on that. "I just need to talk."

He stepped around her and scanned the surrounding trees before holding the flap open with his extended arm and ushering her inside. "All right."

She walked to the center of the tent and he followed her in, closing the flap behind him. This seemed so much smaller than her own quarters. There wasn't a stick of furniture except for his cot. On top of that lay a rumpled sleeping bag, a cord necklace with some kind of black stone tied at the end, and the black leather sheath for his knife. He must sleep with that thing. She'd alerted him by making some noise, and he'd jumped out of bed, armed and ready for battle.

"Just what kind of danger are you expecting to find here on Tenebrosa?"

She turned to speak and caught a glimpse of a light in his expression. But blackness shuttered his eyes so quickly, she wondered if she had imagined the intensity of his reaction. "Hawk?"

He shrugged his broad shoulders, an action that disturbed the atmosphere of the small tent like ripples spreading through water. While Sarah looked away, feeling that unaccustomed awareness heating her cheeks again, Hawk bent over the cot and sheathed the knife in its leather case. "If Salazar doesn't trust his own men, I don't see any reason we should."